| There is a growing body of research that supports the importance of teaching reading strategies to foreign language (FL) students; however, virtually no research has been undertaken that places instruction of reading strategies in the ordinary FL classrooms at the center of attention. By the same token, while FL research has been actively pursuing questions regarding relationships between the reading strategies that some readers employ and the demographics of these readers, it has yet to pursue questions regarding relationships between the reading strategies that FL teachers teach to students and specific demographics of teachers and students.; In order to supplement part of the literature needed in FL research, this exploratory study was designed to address the following two basic questions while focusing on Arabic as a foreign language (AFL): (1) How frequently do teachers of AFL teach each of the 22 reading strategies to their students? (2) To what extent will specific demographic characteristics (the teachers' participation in professional training, the teachers' gender, the teachers' ethnicity/culture, the students' Arabic proficiency level, the students' grade level) relate to frequencies of instruction of the 22 reading strategies? For the purpose of this exploratory study, strategy instruction (or teaching) refers to the teaching of language learning strategies (LLS) through the method of embedded training.; The 22 reading strategies that were investigated by this study were generally based on the National Capital Language Resource Center's (2004) taxonomy of "commonly used and effective language learning strategies" for teaching the different language skills to FL learners, with some adjustments for the purpose of this study. The data was collected by means of a survey to which 106 K-12 reading teachers of AFL in the United States responded. The study results indicated the types of reading strategies taught the most as well as those taught the least by the participants. Frequency of reading strategy instruction was found to be related to the teachers' training participation and to the teachers' gender. However, no clear relationship was found between the frequency of reading strategy instruction and the teachers' ethnicity, the students' school grade level, or the students' Arabic proficiency level. |
